Stanley Rosen - The Language of Love

Martin Black

A Platonic dialogue is a vivid reminder that if human beings love wisdom it must be that we do not understand what we normally mean by love. Similarly, a commentary on a Platonic dialogue by Stanley Rosen is not restricted to textual, linguistic, literary, and conceptual analysis, but provides an expression or reminder of the dialogues animating impulse: to live the philosophical life by thinking through the fundamental questions of human existence. Rosens considerable learning is always employed to the end of understanding, rather than philologicallet alone historicalpurposes.

Rosen first published as a poet of noted ability and promise, attracted to the view that philosophy and poetry are two different languages about the same world. Since the perspectives illuminated by language are dependent upon pre-discursive intuition, then either poetry or philosophy must see more truly, if there is indeed a world or cosmos at all. Rosen came to the view that discursive thought and philosophy are ultimately better able to aspire to an understanding of the whole that was reflexive or that included the perspective of the thinker within it and thus realise the classical aim of self-knowledge.

Rosen reconstituted the argument for the priority of theory or of the goodness of the philosophical life against the grain of twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought, which generally if The modern formulations of the priority of practice to theory have been so deeply absorbed by institutions ostensibly devoted to learning that they regularly justify their existence and increasingly absurd fees by reference to various goods that have nothing to do with learning. Our scholars and intellectuals routinely reduce life and thought to linguistic and historical constructions, that is, to ephemera, and ultimately to the function of rationalisations of power structures, or what have you, thus deprecating their own way of life: has there been a time when so many people wrote, read, and talked as if all discourse was ideology, i.e., devoid of genuine significance?

Platos writings in part responded to contemporary formulations of the same sophistry, because the priority of theory must always appear paradoxical. It seems to detach us from the ordinary concerns of life; it is, in the famous metaphor, learning to die and being dead (Phaedo 64a4-6, 64b7-9). As Rosen shows, the Phaedrus is a prime example of Platos demonstration that a teaching that makes intelligence instrumental to other desires not only debases the intelligence but also the passions. On the other hand, if philosophy is possible and the principles of action and thought are intelligible, then intelligibility itself is good, or the idea of the good and the cause of knowledge and truth.perfection. The preservation of the meaning of human action is possible only if theory is prior to practice. Plato has Socrates show that philosophy is possible and good in part through a myth of the souls end that itself shows the necessity for human beings to use myth. This philosophical poem, which Socrates attributes to Stesichorus, depicts the human soul in its tragi-comic journey through the cosmos in search of a glimpse of the truth of the beings to which we wish to ascend, culminating in a silent glimpse of silent beings that occurs through time amid the conflicts of human existence. The Language of Love contains Rosens most detailed discussion of the dependence of human self-understanding in general, and of philosophical discourse in particular, on the cosmos noetos or the intelligible principles of things that lend art, myth and discourse in general their significance and which Platos interlocutors call the ideas or forms.